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in: 1927 births, 2023 deaths, Directors, American television directors

Robert Butler

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Robert Butler (November 16, 1927 - November 3, 2023) was an American director. He was a very influential and very in demand television director from the mid-1960s to the early part of the 1990s. He helped to launch the career of Kurt Russell through four Walt Disney movies (Including The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and The Barefoot Executive), but his major contributions were made on the small screen.

Butler began his career as a stage manager and an assistant, before he launched his directing career on such television shows as The Twilight Zone, The Untouchables, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Dr. Kildare and The Fugitive.

For the next three decades Butler would be hired to shoot the pilots of a number of now popular TV shows, thus helping to create their identity. These included the following shows: the original Star Trek where he directed the series original pilot episode "The Cage", the war parody sitcom Hogan's Heroes, the campy Batman, the violent The Blue Knight, the revolutionary cop show Hill Street Blues, the mysterious and humorous detective Remington Steele (a show which he helped co-create), the delirious and romantic Moonlighting, the family drama Sisters, and the highly popular character-driver Superman adaptation of the early 1990s, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

In addition to the aformentioned shows, he also directed episodes of other television shows, including, I Spy, The Invaders, Gunsmoke, The Outcasts, Mission: Impossible, Kung Fu, Hawaii Five-0, Columbo, Midnight Caller, The Waltons and Ironside.

Butler won two Emmy Awards for outstanding directing, the first in 1973 for The Blue Knight pilot episode and the second in 1981 for his Hill Street Blue premiere.

Robert Butler died in Los Angeles on November 3, 2023, at the age of 95, days before what would have been his 96th birthday. No cause of death was given.

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